Arizona bowl game fans span the spending spectrum

Valley trips range from 1st class to budget conscious

Football fans from across the country are taking buses, chartered planes and the family cruiser for road trips to Arizona to catch their favorite teams in three bowl games being staged here over the next two weeks.

The BCS Championship - college football's title game - and the Insight and Fiesta bowls will bring a diverse set of fans, all of them with their own spending strategies, from budget to first class. Some are busting the bank for tickets and hotel rooms for the hottest ticket in town: the BCS Championship game between Auburn and Oregon.

"I've seen people buying tickets for 1,000 bucks apiece and not even blinking at it," said Bobby Poundstone, president of the Auburn Alumni Association.

At the other end of the spending scale, 100 Missouri fans opted for a bargain-basement trip to the Insight Bowl. The $99 package includes a bus trip to the game, a game ticket and four hotel nights - two of them on the road. The packages were sold to students and their guests.

"We'll get to the game any way we can," said Kathy Murray, assistant director for Missouri's student-life department, which organized the trip. "It's an adventure."

The first game is the Insight Bowl, Tuesday at Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, with Missouri playing Iowa. On New Year's night, Oklahoma faces Connecticut in the Fiesta Bowl at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale.

The BCS Championship game is Jan. 10, also in Glendale. Here's a breakdown of the three games and what some fans are spending to get to the Valley of the Sun.

BCS Championship

Forget about hanging around outside the stadium looking for a last-minute cheap ticket. Your odds of scoring are in the same category as a Hail Mary pass.

Auburn fans are ready to yell their battle cry, "War Eagle!" at the big showdown. People are paying whatever they can to get tickets.

"It's harder for me to find a fan not going to the game than to find one who is," Poundstone said.

Auburn was allotted 17,000 tickets but sold out instantly to top donors of the university, a die-hard football campus about 55 miles east of Montgomery, Ala.

Poundstone said he guesses another 17,000 people will come to the game, paying anything for tickets that have a face value of $300 or $325.

Heidi McHone, president of the alumni Phoenix Metro Auburn Club, paid $825 for her ticket on the 40-yard line in the lower level of the stadium.

She said a good number of Auburn fans will drive or fly to the Valley, with or without tickets.

"I've been getting a lot of e-mails, including from Denver and Vegas and California," McHone said. "There's just a whole bunch of people coming."

The alumni association has arranged for two charter planes to fly from Montgomery and two planes to fly from Birmingham on Jan. 10, arriving just in time to tailgate and attend the game. Tickets for the flight were $900 apiece, covering the cost of meals, flight and bus rides to and from the game. The cost didn't include game tickets.

Jeremy Arthur, a member of the alumni-association board, said all 145 seats on each plane are full.

"We're a dedicated and loyal bunch," Arthur said.

Oregon fans are similarly crazed. Many of them are willing to spend big dollars to see if their Ducks can win the school's first national championship.

Laura Cooper of Premiere Global Sports said her travel company quickly sold out 900 tour packages, including 500 deluxe packages at $2,300 a person. That deal included round-trip chartered air service, three nights at a Valley resort and booster event transportation. Game tickets were not included.

Cooper said 300 of the packages were sold to Oregon fans two weeks before the team officially qualified for the BCS title game against Auburn.

"This is your hard-core alumni base," she said. "A lot of them have been on our tours for all these years."

Cooper said fans who were unable to buy tickets at face value have paid in excess of $1,000 a ticket.

Bob Strubing, an Oregon fan since 1988, bought four tickets from the university at face value because he's a longtime season-ticket holder and a donor. But he's coming to the Valley via the budget route.

He and his wife, Judi, are driving from Eugene to the game, and they plan to stay at a modest chain hotel in Scottsdale. During the morning of the game, he said, he'll hit a local grocery store to buy goodies for a tailgate party.

Fiesta Bowl

Both teams in the Fiesta Bowl are reportedly struggling to sell the seats allotted to each university, but that's where the similarities end.

For fans of the University of Connecticut, playing in a BCS bowl game against Oklahoma, a team with seven national titles to its name, represents a rare opportunity to prove UConn's upstart football program can stand with a storied national power.

Fans of the University of Oklahoma are simply hoping the team can avoid another debacle in Glendale, where the Sooners have been upset in their past two Fiesta Bowl appearances, against Boise State and West Virginia.

"A lot of (OU) fans have been to the Fiesta Bowl. They've kind of done that rodeo," said Andrew Hewlett, president of the OU Club of Utah, which will have about 20 members at the game.

Hewlett said the trip from Salt Lake City to Phoenix is relatively cheap, but he's hoping other Sooners fans from the West Coast will defy ticket-buying trends and converge in the West Valley.

"The economy's probably got a little bit to do with it," Hewlett said of the reported lack of fan interest. "People are trying to re-evaluate, 'Can I order a pizza for $10 and watch the game in Broken Arrow (Okla.) or Edmond (Okla.) and save a thousand dollars?' "

Fans from both schools suggested that more people might be buying tickets through second-party sites, where upper-deck seats were available Thursday for $15, which will make projecting attendance difficult if it's based on the face-value tickets the schools are trying to sell.

Cost is an even bigger consideration for fans traveling from the East Coast for the game, but Jon Pedersen, a UConn supporter living in New York City, said he was duty-bound to travel to the Fiesta Bowl and support the school's football program.

Pedersen has traveled to past UConn bowl games in Birmingham, Toronto and Detroit, so the prospect of traveling to the Valley and staying at the Phoenician was alluring.

"Getting to Arizona from New York or Connecticut isn't the easiest thing to do or the cheapest thing to do," Pedersen said. "But if we do happen to win, it's going to be a historic moment for the program. If I didn't go and I had the opportunity to go, I'd be kicking myself afterwards."

The convergence of Connecticut football in the Valley provided an opportunity for Musical Instrument Museum president and UConn alum Bill DeWalt to host an alumni reception in the north Phoenix facility.

The museum is offering discounted admission to fans wearing team apparel during the weekend of the Fiesta Bowl and the BCS Championship.

For DeWalt, the Connecticut connection is personal.

"When I was as student at the University of Connecticut, we played in the old Yankee Conference and played such powerhouses as Massachusetts and Maine," DeWalt said. "Whenever a university is in a bowl game of this stature, the people who are associated with that institution, whether it was five years ago or, in my case, more years than I want to admit, you feel that you want to participate and enjoy it."

There will be fewer activities for OU fans who have become accustomed to pregame traditions such as the Boomer Bash, which was canceled this year , but fans from both schools promised that those who make it to the game will be boisterous.

"We're diehards," said Linda Johnson, president of the OU Club of Southern Arizona. "It's just fun to be able to be in that whole environment, and the icing on the cake is when we play well."

Insight Bowl

Officials are doing their best to sell Iowa and Missouri fans on a night game that takes place a few days after Christmas. Insight has a new TV deal and better picks in the Big Ten and Big 12, giving it a bump in bowl juice.

It should be easy enough to pry football fans out of Iowa and Missouri in winter, but tickets haven't been selling well. Iowa sold about 6,000 of its 11,000 allotment by the middle of last week. Missouri fared slightly better, having sold about 7,500.

There are plenty of other tickets available. But on game day, it may be difficult to see which team has packed the stands: both wear black and gold.

Iowa's fan interest may be stunted by the lingering bad taste of three straight losses at the end of the season. The bad vibe was compounded by the recent drug arrest of the school's all-time leading receiver, a senior who was suspended from the team.

"Some people are upset with the way the season ended," said B.J. Katz, president of the Phoenix Iowa Club. "It's a Tuesday night game. The flight prices are really high. . . . I think fans wanted the season to be over with and decided not to come down."

Katz is headed for the game, and he thinks Iowa will attract 15,000 to 20,000 fans to Sun Devil Stadium, helped by local alums and Iowa transplants. The alumni association sold out its three air-tour packages.

There was some grousing among Missouri fans that the team deserved to be in a bigger game. Coach Gary Pinkel appealed to fans to buy tickets to the game and display a robust following that bowl officials look for when they pick teams.

Missouri's alumni association sold out its bowl-trip packages, with the most expensive going for more than $1,500 for two people.

Auburn University football fan Robbie Gentry looks for his team's merchandise at the Just Sports store at Westgate City Center in Glendale. Auburn plays Oregon in the BCS Championship game on Jan. 10 at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale.